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Under The Wire

Wednesday, July 30, 2008

Hi, maybe you heard of a new search engine that promises to take over Google. No, I’m not talking about Live Search. This post will tell you why Cuil sucks, at least for the search I made to test it.

The most important thing that made me angry is that searching for Under The Wire there isn’t any link to this blog. We are at fourth position both in Google and in Live Search, why don’t Cuil link us? After this post I think that our blog will be banned, but so far it doesn’t seems to be a huge loss.

Being serious for a while I’m going to explain other reason that made me say that Cuil isn’t cool. Maybe the fact that we aren’t linked isn’t really good reason, so I’ll show you other Cuil features that only seems to work.

The layout of the result page, with pictures and a more fashionable style, is eye-catching but it can’t help if you can’t find what you were looking for. And trust me, you are not going to find anything useful.

The “tabs” could be a great way to filter search results, but in a lot of the queries I did there was no filtering suggestion. On the other hand when it shows something you’re only few clicks apart form the failure of your search: you won’t find nothing, even if you try to filter Cuil's results.

Also the “explore by category” feature seems to return random results… And I think that this isn’t very useful if we’re talking about a search engine.

Another thing that would help is the typo check and the suggestion to correct the misspelled word. Without this feature nobody will ever being able to find something useful. Maybe I couldn’t find nothing just because I made typing errors, but since nobody told me that I misspelled a word how can I recognize and correct the error?

The only thing I appreciate of Cuil is their privacy page. Looking at what they are saying it’s hard to think that Cuil’s creator were working for Google ;-) This really caught my attention and I think this is the only reason I will give another chance to Cuil. I hope that in the while somebody will tune the algorithms in order to give more effective results. Also a link to this blog for every search made would be a cool thing, but I don’t want to ask too much.

Does Cuil link to your blog? Have Cuil ever returned a useful link while you was searching something with it? Feel free to share your opinion about Cuil in the comments to this post.

Thursday, July 24, 2008

No, I’m not joking. I’m just watching the banners of the new Microsoft advertising campaign.

I hope that at Redmond nobody is thinking that the only way to have Vista installed on more computers is allowing users to crack it. I think that this isn’t the clue of this banner, but I’m sure that not telling that being a pirate is still cool would have been a better choice.

I’m not a pirate, and I think that Vista is good, so for me the Earth isn’t flat anymore! I’m also writing about new Vista’s banner, so maybe at Microsoft someone wanted us to talk about this banner just to get some viral marketing effect. Am I right?

Saturday, July 19, 2008

Before starting writing a new real post I’d like to share what our reader that comes form Google were searching in the last month.

Leopard vs Vista: are we attracting trolls, or just wannabe switcher? Nobody left a comment, so we will never know.

FIFA 2008/FIFA 2008 free: sit down, take a deep breath and listen my words. We are NOT a damn video-game site. The mistake I did was this post. The mistake are doing Google searchers is looking for FIFA 2008: stop playing video-games and have a life!

Live Mesh invitation/Live Mesh invite: I knew this should be one of the most searched entry, geeks are always looking for an invitation to something. Unfortunately I got only few invites and I can’t send invitation to readers were asking for. On the other side we’ve collected some mail address, if I was a spammer I’d pass half my days writing post about invitation and the other half sending chain mails. You're lucky I'm not a spammer, although somebody says I am.

CSS edit under Windows: a lot of people are searching for that, maybe at macRabbit somebody should take note and start writing a porting.

utvv e-mule: I think I know who made this query. I’m glad to see that someone finds our articles useful.

Leopard on a pc: please, stop searching for that… I don't want to be kidnapped by Apple's lawyers.

After the top six (Who said that I must write a top 10 or a top five? I wanted to write a top six!) I'm going to tell you the best queries. Are you ready to laugh?

Somebody was looking for information about how to fix a wire. Actually I think we never wrote a post about this, but you're a very lucky person: since sirus is an electrician we have the right person you're looking for. Just write a comment and we will send sirus at your home to fix all the wires you need. Maybe sirus can help also the guy who wants to wire macbook air to time capsule.

But the real genius is another searcher, somebody that I'd like to meet. His query was an easy-to-give-out Windows Seven invitation. Slow down, our marketing office is at work and when we are going to share invitation of the next windows release you're the first person we're serving. I'm going to invite you also before tcid, I promise that. Just leave your name -and a mail address- on the comments to this rant.

Another friend of us was asking Google if can we use cds on macbook. Well, you shouldn't use cds because they're old.

I think that when someone tells you ask Google he is not meaning that there is somebody called Google you can talk to. So if you write I want my capital G icon back for ie7, you're not talking to Mr Google. And just in case you're thinking to ask Santa Claus, neither he does exists.

Thanks to who was searching for Leopard sucks, you know the truth, but I can't understand what you were looking for. Are you a troll?

Can somebody tell me what is the link between sirus and iPhone? I think I'm missing something. I'd also like to know what was searching who typed whisher and iphone. Thanks god the first link is my old page on WinAddict, so the poor guy found a great post to read.

Just to grab some visit I'm now going to write some dull phrases picking words form this list. I'll let you know what kind of queries will came out this month.

fat albert hole: what girls learn on the mormon beefcacke calendar is a bite of seattle. Red bull flugtag and hot lap dance club. I must stop here before I get crazy.

Saturday, July 12, 2008

I’d like to tell our reader that we didn’t run away with the ad-sense cash, we just have to pass a lot of exam and prepare the defense of our thesis. Actually we have still to finish our thesis, but this is a little detail… I have to write code, write documentation and write presentation, poor my fingers and poor my keyboard. My mind is gone, but I still hope I can do it!

Before coming back to my thesis I suggest you to post a comment on what you’d like to read on utvv. If we survive, after the holidays, we will come back with our fantastic posts.